


the girls who sang into their fists

by theviolonist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-12
Updated: 2015-04-12
Packaged: 2018-03-22 12:55:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3729739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theviolonist/pseuds/theviolonist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Days like that make you feel like you've invented fire, Bellatrix remembers thinking: burning your fingers and inhaling acrid smoke, coughing, and Narcissa with her eyes so blue and alight and mischievous, pulling you close.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the girls who sang into their fists

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [instant gratification ficathon](http://fluffyfrolicker.livejournal.com/60851.html?thread=2237619).

Lucius doesn't come to their lunches after Hogwarts. He doesn't like her.

'Don't say that,' Narcissa reprimands, shaking her cigarette above the crystal ashtray. A thin glowing column descends. 'He's just preoccupied, you know. With everything that's going on.'

Bellatrix laughs.  _She_  likes Lucius; she thought about it for a minute, before Narcissa elected him as her prince, this tall, cold, prematurely white-haired man. 'You know I don't care, Narcissa. Don't waste your lies on me.'

Narcissa gives her a look of gentle reprimand. Her perfect nails tug at Bellatrix's dress. 'Where did you get that? It's foul. Have you really given up wearing anything other than black?'

Bellatrix shakes the fabric out of her sister's grasp, irritated. 'I have things to worry about more important than  _fashion_ , Cissa.' She hates the nickname, giving it and hearing it from a mouth other than her own. It burns her tongue like acid. 

Narcissa's traits rearrange under her scrutiny. 'Well then,' she says, stiff. A neat cloud of smoke floats out of her mouth, obscuring the cutting azure of her gaze. 'Shall we, if you're so busy?'

Bellatrix hesitates. Just a second, but she's trained Narcissa well; she smells weakness like a bloodhound, the smallest of injuries. Her lips quirk up a fraction.

Bellatrix shakes her head to dislodge the fear; her neck hurts, stiff from craning to discern something in a face so well-known to her it has rounded back to mysterious.

'Lead the way,' she says, as Narcissa slides out of her chair and into the sun.

 

-

 

It's a good hotel. There are mints on the pillows, fluffy bathrobes and Narcissa looks exhausted, her skin so pale she might be a ghost, someone Bellatrix could walk through and escape. She reaches a hand towards where Bellatrix is trying to burn her naked imprint into the pale sky. 

'Don't just stand there,' she says, not unkindly. 'People might look up.'

'Let them look.'

Narcissa lights another cigarette. It's another thing she hides from Lucius, another habit she can't shake; filthy things, picked up from childhood. At thirteen there had been a shed and a pack of fags on the ground, left behind by a Muggle in one of the woods that encircle the manor. Days like that make you feel like you've invented fire, Bellatrix remembers thinking: burning your fingers and inhaling acrid smoke, coughing, and Narcissa with her eyes so blue and alight and mischievous, pulling you close.

'I wish you wouldn't make things so difficult,' Narcissa says, her tone slightly pained. She always makes Bellatrix feel like the little sister, the smallest of their triumvirate —no, the smallest of their pair, of their couple.

'It spices up life,' Bellatrix says, 'don't you think?'

Narcissa gives her a long look from under blonde eyelashes. 'Life hardly needs spicing up at the moment.'

This is a gift, Narcissa's gift, those few words in her sharp-toothed mouth: this is where Bellatrix regains her footing,the certainty that she is the one out of the two of them with the more talent for panache in destruction, for fire and brimstone, for ash back to ash and all that Muggle vernacular.

She takes a dancing step away from the window, well-attuned to their familiar choreography, and the shadow of her silhouette moves across the sheets, preceding her to Narcissa's lap, her hand now open, palm up, at her side, quietly waiting. 

'Ah,' Bellatrix says, savoring the word, a needed reprieve, 'that's where you're wrong.'

 

-

  

They fought a lot, back then: more than ever. When they were children Narcissa was Bellatrix's ally, her translator to the world, the sharp-eyed intelligent child who interpreted Bellatrix's gibberish, her accesses of anger, her day-long disappearances in the labyrinthine gardens; Narcissa who would appear in her hiding places just before sundown, her little white shoes tarred with mud and grass-green, to bring her home. But at Hogwarts they fought. It wasn't enough to find different factions, different friends, different lovers; they would catch each other by the arm, drag each other away in nooks and hiss, 'what are you doing,' 'you know I don't like him,' 'don't say this so loud.'

Now Bellatrix suspects it was just so they wouldn't forget. She has seen other siblings, the way they detach. But Narcissa would never let her go, and for what it's worth— well, it's obvious.

Their parents used to like it, this closeness. They dressed them in the same colors, pastels and golds, and Andromeda, Andromeda whose face Bellatrix helped burn off the tapestries, Andromeda would get the browns and the lavenders and not care at all, always in her books, so quiet, so gentle, so unworthy of the ancient name of Black. Bellatrix wears it a little too well, but everybody's got their crosses to bear. 

They don't fight now. There are other wars that require their attention. Days like this, when they meet, the Black lunches in a part of the city that doesn't bear naming, they content themselves with a blanket rage, the kind that doesn't need a target. Or perhaps the whole world is a target. In any case they know how to engineer pain to make love an impossibility: Narcissa orders white lilies to be brought up to the room before they arrive, primps herself up too much, wears Lucius's locket under her clothes, her wedding ring shining its outrageous gold; and Bellatrix makes sure to be unkempt, dark hair limp, to wear her untidy allegiance on her sleeve, visible to all. They enjoy this, the Nietzschean archetypes. It is easier, certainly. 

 

-

 

No, it shouldn't have started. But it was a long time ago, too, during a vacation in Rome when they were children; so they can be pardoned, excused—absolved, if anything. Or maybe it was later, at Hogwarts during one of those shouting matches, in the damp Slytherin rooms that Narcissa has always hated; unless it was before that? Unless it was the day Narcissa was born, the exact spark of her soul, its perverse nestling in the corners of everything Bellatrix was, even then, the slow wearing down of her childish defenses unless she was there always, indispensable. 

Maybe it is now. Maybe there is a way back from this, and it is now, and turning her cheek on Narcissa's thigh is the mistake that tips the scales, heaven or hell, what write-up one gets in the annals of the Noble Family Black. 

Oh, well.

 

-

 

It would be easy for Narcissa to make an excuse to stay the night, but she never does; never, before today. She lies there beautiful and silent in the dim light, watching Bellatrix trying to shake some obscure unease. She never could stand still; when they were children Narcissa was the one to follow her outside when Bellatrix slipped through the window, taking comfort in the brisk coldness of the night. Maybe—

'What are you thinking?' Her voice is sing-song. She pretends well. She always has.

'Nothing.' She turns around. Narcissa's eyes are closed. She looks almost soft, like this. If you didn't know her. 'The war-'

'It doesn't matter,' Narcissa says. She is the strongest of the both of them, Bellatrix knows that, but she lets her strength rot, wasted on a politician husband, on her son, on her garden.

'You should be fighting with me,' Bellatrix says. She's said this before, and she'll say it again. If Narcissa is the strongest, she's certainly the most stubborn.

Narcissa opens an eye. 'I don't fight losing battles,' she says, her coolness altered by a catch in her voice. 'There's still time, you know.'

Bellatrix laughs, bitter. 'To be a traitor? I'll pass, Cissa.' She sees things, when her eyes are screwed shut; a real blue-blooded witch, she sees things and Narcissa used to  _believe_ , so why—why— 'Fight with me. This is worth it. We will win, I know how you love winning—you'll see, it will be—'

'Everything you've ever wanted,' Narcissa says, impossibly kind, and Bellatrix turns around to see her sitting up, erected like the prow of a ship. Unyielding. 'And when it burns to the ground,' she says in a whisper, 'I'll be there. I'll pull you out.'

She's wrong. She's wrong, but for some reason it gets Bellatrix, surprises her still. How could she forget? Having Narcissa Black —sorry, Malfoy— love you is as good as that philosopher's stone they say might not be lost, in the end-- whatever happens, she still follows in the night. If Bellatrix gets lost —but she won't—, she'll still walk through the labyrinth, still save her, still get her to come home.

Narcissa scoffs. 'Enough with the melodrama. Come to bed, Bella.' She opens the sheets with a large sweep of her hand, lacquered nails catching the light. 'Come on,' she says, and Bellatrix can't help it, cannot keep her feet from moving, carrying her close, closer every time, 'come on, kiss me.'

 


End file.
